How To Build Future-Proofed Applications | Part 1 - Introduction and goals

At Masking Technology, our mission is to make software development more cost-efficient. We primarily do this by focusing on the biggest challenge in the industry: dealing with change. Through research and experience, we develop tools and methods that enable building future-proof applications. As an open organization, we aim to share as much as possible, and that is where this article comes in.

For over a year, we've dedicated our efforts to addressing the challenge of architectural uncertainty. Architecture serves as the foundation of any application, and modifying it can quickly become complex or even unmanageable. Therefore you want to have it right the first time. But what is right in a continuously changing context? Exactly, you'll never know.

Our focus is on creating a flexible architectural approach that enables applications to begin with simplicity and evolve toward complexity over time. We call this a just-In-time architecture style. This has resulted in an open-source solution called Jitar (abbreviation of just-in-time architecture). In essence, Jitar takes a lot of the architectural decisions from the code, and makes it configurable. Besides taking away most of the uncertainties, it also makes the code a lot simpler and more readable.

But the proof is in the pudding. So, we started building a real world application using Jitar. We're happy to introduce Comify, an open-source comic-based social media application. Its intent is not to disrupt the social-media space, but to learn and improve building applications that can grow. And we won't stop at the architecture level. Our goal is to apply as much of our future-proofing vision as possible.

In the upcoming months we'll write more articles (max 500 words) to take you along our journey. In the next article we'll dive deeper into the idea behind Comify. From there we'll continue with our development strategy, from requirements to maintenance. We'll share our approaches, decisions, findings and results. Every step in the process we'll relate to our vision on how to build future-proofed applications. By sharing the things we do, we hope to help and inspire others.

Masking Technology is a small consultancy company aimed at helping other companies smoothing their development life cycle. Writing articles is not a part of our core business. So why are we willing to put in all this effort? It's simple. To keep improving our services, products and vision we need feedback. For us, sharing goes two ways. Therefore we hope that you are willing to give some love back and share your thoughts with us. Doubts, ideas, everything is welcome.

With that we want to close this first introductory article (in 453 words). We hope to find you back at our next ones, and maybe even to share thoughts with you someday.